Special Interest are a noise-fucked electronic punk band from New Orleans. Their Bandcamp genre tags include “no wave,” “anarcho glam,” and “Gregg Araki’s cd collection.” The first song on their 2018 debut album is called ” Young, Gifted, Black, In Leather.” As you may have discerned, their music is chaotic and urgent and deceptively catchy, and an impressive new batch of it just hit the internet.
The Passion Of, Special Interest’s second LP, won’t be on vinyl until late summer, but it’s streaming right now. It is well worth your time. Of all the groups who’ve attempted an industrial wasteland sound over the years, few have so thoroughly captured the claustrophobic busyness of online life and the rapid pace at which catastrophes disappear down the timeline.
Yet The Passion Of’s throbbing pulse and in-your-face punk posture suggest the album is built for the real world. Fittingly, its lyrical screeds tackle real-life problems: “What happens when there’s nothing left to gentrify and genocide is on your side?” they ask on the vividly titled “Homogenized Milk.” Even when they seem to narrow to a personal focus, as on “Tina,” they communicate with an empowering edge: “How you doin’/ What you doin’/ What’s good, bitch?” And on closing track “With Love,” when Alli Logout proclaims, “I don’t wanna get the freedom choked out of me,” they reach a peak of prescient intensity.
Stream the album below.
The Passion Of is out now on Night School/Thrilling Living. Buy it here.
